Organizations and consumers increasingly use third-party services to store data. Third-party storage services may provide a number of benefits to customers, including flexibility, low capitalization requirements, add-on services, data sharing, and centralized access to data.
Many third-party storage customers want or need to encrypt their data before submitting the same to a third-party storage vendor. For example, individual consumers may wish to encrypt data sent to third-party storage vendors due to privacy concerns. Similarly, organizations may wish to encrypt data sent to third-party storage vendors in order to ensure compliance with internal or external data-protection requirements, such as governmental laws and regulations, partnership agreements with other organizations, etc. Unfortunately, by encrypting data before submitting the same to a third-party storage system, customers may interfere with a third-party storage vendor's attempt to deduplicate the data. For example, if two customers encrypt identical files using different encryption schemes (e.g., different keys), the resulting encrypted files will differ, potentially preventing the third-party storage vendor from deduplicating the files into a single file that is referenced multiple times. Additionally, encrypting files before submitting the files to a third-party storage system may interfere with the ability of a third-party storage service to efficiently share the files with other users where directed.
Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for sharing data stored on secure third-party storage platforms.